lyrical and fine.' -'The Boston Globe' 'An epic. it goes places few narrators would dare to tread. has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being.' -'-Los Angeles Times Book Review '(cover review) 'A big, cheeky, splendid novel. Deliriously American.' -'The New York Times Book Review' (cover review) 'A towering achievement. A deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American twentieth century.' -'The New York Times' 'Expansive and radiantly generous. lyrical and fine., 'Part Tristram Shandy, part Ishmael, part Holden Caulfield, Cal is a wonderfully engaging narrator.

has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being., A big, cheeky, splendid novel. A novel of chance, family, sex, surgery, and America, it contains multitudes., A towering achievement. Middlesex is about a hermaphrodite in the way that Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel is about a teenage boy. Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. My most recent driver's license.records my first name simply as Cal.' So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. 'I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960 and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974.

Middlesex book cover